Babbage Forum in Asia: Reconfiguring supply chain networks

Asia faces a new set of industrial innovation policy challenges as it navigates post-pandemic recovery, geopolitical tensions, and rapid technological change.

The region, a global economic powerhouse, must balance economic growth with technological sovereignty while ensuring the resilience of supply chains and the competitiveness of its industries. These challenges are compounded by the ongoing technological race and rising protectionism, which threaten to fragment global trade and disrupt established industrial ecosystems. In response, Asian countries have adopted diverse strategies to address these challenges through industrial innovation policies (IIPs).

In 2024, Babbage Forum members from South Korea, China, Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan gathered in Seoul to update the status of their countries’ IIPs. This report summarises the findings from that meeting, held in Seoul, South Korea, on 1 July 2024. It serves as a synthesis of these discussions, highlighting key insights from the keynote presentations and subsequent discussions.

Babbage Forum members from Thailand (representing Southeast Asia), China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea were first invited to deliver keynotes to provide an update on their regions’ IIPs and policymaking contexts. These presentations were followed by open-ended discussions among 19 delegates about the pressing issues in the region: supply chain evolution, decoupling and technological bottlenecks, and emerging technologies.

Hosted within the Institute for Manufacturing at the Engineering Department of the Uni­versity of Cambridge, the aim of the Babbage Forum is to inform the practice of policy­making related to technology, innovation and manufacturing through a better integration of economic, engineering and management perspectives. The approach has been to gather a small international community of leading figures in economics, engineering, and operations and to distill effective policy practices.

Download the meeting report